Quotes from June Jordan

I am a woman searching for her savagery even if it's doomed

momma help me turn the face of history to your face. - Getting Down To Get Over - Dedicated To My Mother

These poems they are things I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are from "These Poems

Bisexuality means to me that I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there's nothing better to do.

the problem of gender identity is our evasion of the implications of power and our may-I-say-"feminine" inclinations to make nice. War is not nice.

A man is not a tree'...If we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.

This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.

The expression of hatred for your enemies is sometimes the only way to end self-hatred.

Our runaways may well be the backbone courageous among our kids: the ones who will risk hunger and forced prostitution and jail and death, in order to say NO to this overwhelming suffocation and victimizing, adult defeat into which they have been trapped, by dint of being born.

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND REACTION I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC OUT THE WINDOWS I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY NOBODY COLD I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE

Who the hell set things up like this?

I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.

In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is self-denial.

And I am not pleased I am not very pleased None of this fits into my notion of "things going very well

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life

Do You Follow Me We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

I try to use words, whether in prose or poetry, that people can understand, that make them feel in an intense way. I'm a writer, that's what I do.

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

Sure enough, we have plenty of exposure to white everything so why would we opt to remain our African/Asian/Mexican selves? The answer is that suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: There is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you--who you really are--do survive.

The State Lay in wait Attica Attack Troops wearing masks carrying gas cannisters and proud to be white proud to be doing what everyone can for The Man

These Poems - 1936-2002 These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? These words they are stones in the water running away These skeletal lines they are desperate arms for my longing and love. I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me whoever you are whoever I may become.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think." June Jordan